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-- George Walker, who quit his job as a bank executive to join a foundation working for an end to apartheid: "Change in this country has to come from us Afrikaners. And I want to be in on it."
-- A housewife living near Johannesburg who did not want her name used: "If the leaders tell us that blacks can live next door, what can I do? If they are clean and not noisy, I won't object. But I hope my children finish school before the blacks are allowed in."
-- Dawie Crous, a traffic policeman: "It's easy to hate blacks. I've seen enough crime and senseless stuff among black drivers on the roads to wonder what the hell would happen if these guys were the ones laying down the law. I have to be honest and say that I feel more comfortable with my own people, that means Afrikaner people. But we all know that changes will have to come. I can't say I feel threatened."
-- Johan de Villiers, who farms 5,000 acres along the Limpopo River: "We whites are always worried about our future and our children's future. We're always avaricious. We always want more and more. The African is different. If there is a drought, he moves on. He can adapt. If they can control their breeding and we can control our avarice, there is no reason we can't somehow get together. We do the planning, they do the work."
-- Hansie Willemse, a farmer near the Zimbabwe border: "I fought in Zimbabwe for 22 years. Yes, I fought. Now I'm sick of fighting. I think they are capable here of sorting something out around a table. That's what should have happened 50 years ago. I don't think it's too late."
It is difficult to draw firm conclusions from random interviews, but it is obvious that many Afrikaners regard the traditional apartheid as doomed. They anticipate significant changes and, though anxious and apprehensive, insist they are ready to cope with them. Whether they are really ready is another question.
Actually, even Afrikaner politicians have been proclaiming for some time that change is coming. It was in 1979 that Piet Koornhof, then Minister of Cooperation and Development, rather boldly announced to an audience in Washington, "Apartheid as you came to know it is dead." And none other than the crusty, old (now 71) Botha declared that the "aspirations of urban blacks and the fulfillment of them must form part of the strategy for the protection of everyone in South Africa."
Those pronouncements sounded like little more than empty rhetoric until, under great pressure from both the black majority and the outside world, Botha in that same year grudgingly drew up a list of what he called reforms. Some were of considerable significance, though they consisted mainly of canceling a few of the more obnoxious harassments sanctioned by the 200-odd apartheid laws. The law excluding blacks from official labor unions was rescinded in 1979 (about l million are now members). The law forbidding interracial marriage went in 1985. The hated passbooks, which sharply restricted a black's right to travel and find a new job, were abolished last year. Other, supposed reforms, such as the creation of two separate and powerless legislative chambers for South Africa's Asians and coloreds, were introduced but had little effect.